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"The Suicide of Thought: Reflections on Voegelin and Walker Percy"

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"The Suicide of Thought: Reflections on Voegelin and Walker Percy" Copyright 2005 Dr.Grant Kaplan I. The Backdrop of Suicide Walker Percy (1916-1990) was born into an aristocratic, Southern family of Scottish descent. Though noble and successful, the family was haunted by melancholy.1 [1] Paul Elie writes, "There was a suicide in nearly every generation. One Percy man dosed himself with laudanum; another leaped into a creek with a sugar kettle tied around his neck. John Walker Percy -- Walker Percy's grandfather -- went up to the attic in 1917 and shot himself in the head." (Elie 10) Walker 's father, Leroy Pratt Percy, took his life in similar fashion just twelve years later. When Walker was only fifteen, and the family only two years removed from Leroy Pratt's death, his mother drove into a lake with his younger brother in the passenger seat. Most believe it was an accident, but Walker confessed privately that he thought it was intentional.2 [2] The impact of these suicides was not marginal; Percy explains, "The central mystery of my life is to figure out why my father committed suicide."3 [3] Though he never considered himself to be suicidal, he often referred to himself as an "ex-suicide."4 [4] 1 [1] For the definitive book on the Percy family see Bertram Wyatt-Brown's The House of Percy. 2 [2] For this account see Samway (1997 pp. 54-56). Samway argues persuasively that it was not a suicide, but offers evidence that Walker thought it to be. 3 [3] Samway (1997 p. 316). 4 [4] For one location see Kramer and Lawson (1985 p. 164). The question of suicide not only hovered about Percy's life, but infused his fictional writings. Each of the six novels references at least one suicide or attempted suicide involving a central character.5 [5] In a 1984 interview with Jo Gulledge, Percy confesses, "I would like to think of starting where Faulkner left off, of starting with the Quentin Compson who didn't commit suicide. Suicide is easy. Keeping Quentin Compson alive is something else. In a way Binx Bolling [of The Moviegoer] is Quentin Compson who didn't commit suicide." (Kramer and Lawson 1985 p. 300). For Percy, the personal and existential question suicide was of interest, but of greater interest was how an individual navigated through the world not committing suicide. One commentator remarks, "The question that interested Percy, then, is how to live, day to day and hour to hour." (Desmond 2005 p. 59) In his writings Percy sought to address not only a deep melancholy that could appear in certain individuals, but a wider malaise that hovered over late modernity. The question of suicide confronted not only individuals, but entire cultures, especially his own.6 [6] In one novel his hero remarks on the Battle of Verdun: "Here began the hemorrhage and death by suicide of the old Western world: white Christian Caucasian Europeans, sentimental music-loving Germans and rational clear-minded Frenchmen, slaughtering each other without passion." (1971 p. 40) He sought to explore not only what made such slaughter possible, but how the individual as wayfaring 5 [5] William Allen writes, 'Invariably, Percy's protagonists have a painful relationship with a weak or even suicidal father that eventually drives them to consider taking their own lives, and the resolution in The Second Coming of Will Barrett's psychic struggle to deal with his father's suicide appears to be the natural culmination of Percy's fiction." (1986 p, xii) 6 [6] John Desmond writes, "[Percy] was most concerned with the general ethos of spiritual suicide or despair he witnessed in twentieth century Western culture. It was possible for Percy to speak of an �age of suicide' or thanatos" (2005 p. 60). pilgrim might turn away from both the individual thanatonic compulsion, and the wider love of death that seemed to hover over not only the death camps, but also the everydayness of the ex-urbs and golfing communities. To my knowledge Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) did not treat the topic of individual suicide in any of his published writings. Yet he philosophized against the backdrop of the German culture that had destroyed not only its Jews, but, in a very real way, itself. The following essay reads Voegelin's philosophy as an attempt to identify the suicidal foundations in the culture, and to provide an alternative foundation for Western existential and political order. II. Percy and Voegelin: The Connection My discovery of Percy followed closely on the heels of my first at length encounter with Voegelin's writings in 2002. It was obvious to me that Percy pursued Voegelinian themes, After reading Percy's blurb on the back of Voegelin's Autobiographical Reflections, I had assumed that Voegelin's influence on Percy would be well documented. A perusal of the literature on Percy unveils that precious little is said of this influence; most indexes list only one reference to Voegelin, and the mention is fleeting. Such relative neglect may in fact be warranted: Percy commented frequently on his own writing yet very rarely mentions Voegelin (the two volumes of conversations edited by Lawson and Kramer mention Voegelin only once).7 [7] Percy's greatest debt was owed to Kierkegaard and Charles Peirce, and the works of Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, 7 [7] Cleanth Brooks writes, "Neither has [Percy], so far as I know, ever mentioned Voegelin and may never have read him." Although perhaps valid at the time of his essay, Percy's own admission of having read Voegelin, in addition to the aforementioned blurb, leaves no doubt that Percy did in fact read Voegelin. Marcel and Heidegger had a lasting effect on him. Percy made this debt clear in his non-fiction writings, and various commentators have retraced these threads responsibly.8 [8] Noted Percy scholars Lewis Lawson and Cleanth Brooks have written essays that explore the connection between Percy and Voegelin concerning the problem of Gnosticism. My own essay only offers to explore in greater depth the proposal of Brooks, to point out "some highly interesting, and I think, significant parallels between the writings of these two men." (Broughton, 261). When the thought of Percy and Voegelin are placed side by side within paradigm of suicide, one can observe a more profound connection between the thinkers than would otherwise be possible. III. Tracing the Parallel In order to give their parallel interests some formal structure, the remainder of this essay will focus on four themes play a prominent role in Percy's and Voegelin's thought. They are: the devaluation of language, the insufficiency of natural science to provide an adequate anthropology and the equation of Gnostic with modernity, and its deleterious consequences. A. The devaluation of language Reflecting on the positive influence of Stefan Georg and Karl Kraus in his Autobiographical Reflections, Voegelin writes of "the fantastic destruction of the German language during the Imperial period of Germany after 1870." (1989 p. 17). The destruction of language comes at the hand of "the ideological thinker [who] has lost contact with reality and develops symbols for 8 [8] For Percy's own commentary see the essays "Is a Theory of Man Possible," "From Facts to Fiction," "Diagnosing the Modern Malaise," "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind," (Percy 1991 pp. 111-29, 186-90, 204-21, 271-91. expressing not reality but his state of alienation from it." (1989 p. 17) For Voegelin, language was never an arbitrary set of markers, but the symbolic means through which a culture or people expressed reality, however imperfectly. Take for example the way armchair Freudians might use the term "repressed." If one fidgets, does not regularly engage in satisfying sexual encounters, appears tense or tightly wound, etc., the Freudian diagnoses a repression that could only be cured by a good orgasm. One could also give the example of "guilt" and the influence of religion. But the point is not to pick on Freudians, for, after all, maybe they have it right; rather, it is to recognize that when such language becomes public, then it has an enormous impact on how the culture understands itself and its relation to what Voegelin calls the divine ground. Instead of an imperfect language striving toward reality, the culture inherits a distorted language that forsakes reality, and Voegelin considers the results disastrous. For Voegelin, distorted language always has a political impact. Society as ordered relies on a prior intellectual or cognitive order in its citizens, or at least those that make decisions. The destruction of language represents a culture's suicide insofar as it allows space for totalitarianism. Voegelin explains, The phenomenon of Hitler is not exhausted by his person. His success must be understood in the context of an intellectually or morally ruined society in which personalities who otherwise would be grotesque, marginal figures can come to public power because they superbly represent the people who admire them. (1989 p. 18)9 [9] 9 [9] Voegelin makes the same point in the essay treated below. He writes, "Is Humboldt's conception, then since it doesn't have a grip in reality, a harmless illusion? This question must unfortunately be answered in the negative. Indeed one cannot realize a Second Reality, but the spiritual closure within it is a real phenomenon and has an actual effect on reality. In this regard the structure of the pneumopathological case doesn't differ from that of the psychopathological: the delusions of a paranoid person also correspond to no reality but the delusions are real and the actions of the paranoid enter into reality." (1990 p.
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